My Review Of: MyCokeRewards.com

Fizzy site tastes flat

Most often I'll review a website because I'm asked to do so. Other times I'll see a website I really like and I'll feel compelled to write about it. Sometimes, though, a site will be so poorly thought out that I just have to rant about it. This is one of those latter times.

You may know that I drink a lot of Coke (here and here). About, oh, six months ago, I signed up for an account at MyCokeRewards.com to earn something back for my patronage. I've managed to amass nearly 500 points in that sime—about 50 12-packs or 166 20-oz bottles. Suffice to say I'm on the site several times a week, enough that I'm regularly annoyed by several "features" of the site.

First, the site switched shortly after my signup to a Flash-based design. This caused my browser and my password program to be unable to save or fill-in passwords. Instead, I'm forced to enter my password manually every time.

You'd think the "Remember Me" feature on the site would make this easier, but no: the site only remembers your username (e-mail address), not your password. What's the point of a "Remember Me" feature if you're only going to remember my name and nothing else about me?

Far too often, the site displays a survey when I log in. Sometimes I've already clicked "Enter Codes" when this happens, at which time I'm unable to enter codes in the form until I close the survey. Hey, folks! Let me decide how I want to proceed through your site!

The site is slow. I don't have a speedy desktop Mac, but it's slow on my new Mac laptop and my reasonably new PC desktop. Stop it with all the animation and just get me to where I want!

Speaking of surveys, if you want to know what my favorite [insert type of beverage here] is, give me the opportunity to answer either 1) not one of your products or 2) I don't drink these. It's pretty stupid to think that everyone that answers the survey drinks only Coke products and and drinks from every possible category. I end up either lying on a particular question or just canceling the survey; which of those helps you?

It's not bad enough that all of the above occurs, but today you tried to open a popup window. Quit interrupting me!

And get some better rewards up there! There are people other than kids using your site—I think.

[Update (07/08/2009): Looks like mycokerewards.com finally got their act together: sometime in the last 10 days they converted to a standard HTML site instead of a Flash site. I can now use my password manager to log me in and the site is quite snappy.]